Obama Praises Mars Rovers, US Science in Speech

Intrepid rovers on Mars responsible for major scientific discoveries on the Red Planet exemplify what is "best in us," President Barack Obama said today (April 29).

Obama made the remarks during an address to the National Academy of Sciences that marked the organization's 150th anniversary. In the speech, Obama expressed his support for the sciences as a fundamental part of American life in today's world.

"Today, all around the country, scientists like you are developing therapies to regenerate damaged organs, creating new devices to enable brain controlled prosthetic limbs, and sending sophisticated robots into space to search for signs of past life on Mars," Obama said during his address. "That sense of wonder and that sense of discovery, it has practical applications but it also nurtures what I believe is best in us."

Achieving those research goals takes funding, something that the sciences are somewhat short on according to Obama.

"What we produce here ends up having benefits worldwide," Obama said. "We should be reaching for a level of private and public research and development investment that we haven't seen since the height of the space race. That's my goal."

At the moment, however, the sequester — sweeping budget cuts that are expected to hamper scientific research — could make those goals harder to achieve, Obama said.

"It's hitting our scientific research," Obama said. "Instead of racing ahead … our scientists are left wondering if they'll be able to start any new research projects at all, which means we could lose a year, two years, of scientific research."

Many planetary scientists have already come out against NASA's 2014 budget proposal. The new document cuts funding from the space agency by $50 million but advocates say that the new budget, if approved by Congress, represents a $268 million cut from planetary sciences funding.

Hope for the sciences is not lost, Obama added. The next generation of potential scientists gives him hope for the future of the country.

"We don't want our kids to just be consumers of the amazing things that science generates," Obama said. "We want them to be producers as well."

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter and Google+. Follow us on Twitter, Facebookand Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

View the original article here

NASA Rover's New Red Planet Address: Yellowknife, Mars

The patch of Mars where NASA's Curiosity rover touched down Sunday night (Aug. 5) has a name: Yellowknife.

The moniker is a tribute to the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories, a city that has long served as the jumping-off point for geologists interested in studying North America's oldest rocks, scientists said.

"If you ask, 'What is the port of call you leave from to go on the great missions of geological mapping to the oldest rocks in North America?' — it's Yellowknife," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters Friday (Aug. 10).

In the home stretch of Curiosity's eight-month space cruise, Grotzinger and his team divided the rover's predicted landing zone inside Mars' Gale Crater into a set of 151 "quadrangles," each of which measures about 1 mile (0.6 km) on a side.

The idea was to break the work of characterizing the landing zone into manageable chunks. The Curiosity rover landed on Quadrangle 51, which the team has dubbed Yellowknife.

Curiosity's main mission is to determine if the Gale Crater area could ever have supported microbial life. Mars appears hostile to Earth-like life today, at least on the surface. But things might have been different in the past, which is why the rover team is drawing connections with the 2.7-billion-year-old rocks of northwest Canada.

"We went to Mars to really get at the ancient geology, because that's where we think there might be evidence for past environments similar to on Earth," said Curiosity deputy project scientist Joy Crisp, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "So it's connected in that way — simply, ancient rocks that might preserve evidence of past environments favorable for life."

Curiosity will likely be in Yellowknife for a while (the rover won't even take its first drive for two weeks or so), but eventually the six-wheeled robot will leave the quadrangle to explore more of Gale and to investigate Mount Sharp, the mysterious 3-mile-high (5 km) mountain that rises from the crater's center.

The mission team is not in a big rush. Curiosity's prime mission is slated to last about two Earth years, and the rover's nuclear power source may keep it roaming for considerably longer than that if no key parts break down, researchers have said.

Visit SPACE.com for complete coverage of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

View the original article here